Thoughts From a Random Fan

Some Spoilers Below--- Fair Warning

I decided to come out of Blog-Hiding to talk about the How I Met Your Mother series finale. It's been an hour since it finished, and the amount of vitriol being thrown at it on Twitter and Facebook I find to be truly, truly unfair. I, in fact, think the complete opposite of the finale. It was a beautifully acted and written swan song to a great TV show. 

Before I go into the finale, I feel it necessary to explain my relationship to the show.  I'm not an obsessed superfan like I was for a show like Lost (I watched every episode of Lost when it aired. EVERY episode.) While I've caught the majority of How I Met Your Mother episodes for the past couple of season, more than anything, it's been more of a comforting presence for me. Having a crappy Monday? Here's a couple of laughs from characters that you know and love. Even the bad episodes put a smile on my face. Yes, I admit there were bad episodes. You can't air 208 episodes of show and not have a couple absolute stinkers mixed in. But by and large, the legacy and memory of How I Met Your Mother will be a positive one in my eyes, made that much better by the intelligence of the finale. 

The finale was always going to be bittersweet for me for the reasons I explained above. It hurts to lose something that you've grown so used to. But I was truly afraid at the beginning that the emotional impact of the episode was going to be lost by the creators trying to be too "cutesy" with their trademark time shifts. But, I eventually bought into it after I realized that they were going to bridge the gap between now and when the Ted's kids were hearing the story. And while I won't go into every twist and turn along the way, I will say that there were moments that genuinely affected me, none more than Barney meeting his daughter for the first time. Between playing Barney and hosting awards shows, I sort of forgot that Neil Patrick Harris can seriously act. Makes me want to dig through Youtube to find clips of him when he played Mark in Rent. That being said, all the main players had their moments to impress, and they did. Of course, that is not the part (or one of the parts) that has seemingly divided people. That award goes to the last  ~ 10 minutes of the show, which I'll eventually have to rewatch because someone started slicing onions in my vicinity and I fear I may have missed a beat or two.  

Yes, in a show called How I Met Your Mother, they did underuse the titular mother. Cristin Milioti stole every scene she was in this season, which is impressive considering the anticipation fans had in meeting and seeing her. And yes, after openly admitting in episode one that Robin was not the mother, the show kept harping on the relationship between Ted and Robin, wearing out that plot-line yet somehow continuously revisiting it and keeping it watchable. The ending of the finale and the show worked for me for one single reason that too has been a fact since episode one: Ted Mosby is an unreliable narrator. 

Ted Mosby the narrator (or SagetTed, as many reviewers took to calling him) was an untrustworthy storyteller. He constantly forgot details (who will ever forget blah blah?) and probably embellished a good majority of his stories. But the biggest lie he told was one he probably didn't even realize he was telling. This lie was the first question he ever asked in the series, "Kids, have I ever told you the story of how I met your mother?" The story of How I Met Your Mother fit the character of Ted Mosby perfectly. We learned in the pilot that he perhaps acts far too quickly on his impulse, such as telling Robin he loves her on their first date. I read his kids' reaction to the end of his story as just that: he meant to talk about the mother more, but instead he harped on what was really on his mind: Robin. And they totally called him out on it. 

So yes, in some ways, the people saying that the finale destroyed the previous nine seasons of the show have a bit of a point, but not that drastic. I would instead describe the show as a long, character driven troll on the audience. A troll that, personally, I would have had a negative reaction to also if not for the relationship I developed with the characters, especially Ted.  To that end, this finale was fan service to the people who checked in through the years and grew close with these characters, such as myself. The characters and actors who play them will always hold a special memory for me. 


I hope this made sense. Thank you for taking the time to read. Please comment (politely) and I will do my best to respond.